Of Men and Mutants
by WorthingtonIII
Summary: An Original Character story that will focus at least partially on humanity's persecution of Homo superior.
1. The Undecimated

(A/N: This is probably not the place to say this, but the Decimation thing pisses me off. It's true there were way too many mutants, but cut the number in half, not by 90! Or even just make a rule against creating mutant characters outside of X-titles. Okay, I'm done.)

Was it true?

This thing they were calling the Decimation. Could it really be true?

Ninety percent of the world's mutants, suddenly powerless! If this was real, then Jack might be saved!

He quickly turned off the radio talk show he had been listening to and ran upstairs, brushing past his dad on the way up. His dad called out to him to be careful, but Jack just kept on barreling toward his room. He threw the door open and ran to the desk. Throwing open the drawer, he withdrew a pair of scissors, and stared at them.

He had accidentally cut himself with these scissors a year ago, and in the process discovered his mutant powers. It would be poetic justice if he now used them to reveal that his powers had suddenly disappeared…

Closing his eyes, he dragged the scissors across his arm.

He opened his eyes and stared at the wound. The blood was slowly pouring to the floor. So far so good.

But then it stopped.

The blood stopped coming. The pain disappeared. The edges of the wound closed in on each other until the skin rejoined into a tender scar, which promptly faded from view.

Jack stared at the unmarred flesh for a moment, then slowly began to cry.

Was it true?

This thing they were calling the Decimation. Could it really be true?

Ninety percent of the world's mutants, suddenly powerless! If this was real, then Nick might never speak to Claudine again!

He quickly turned off the television and closed his eyes, trying to make contact again. His mother called that it was time for dinner, but Nate just sat there with his eyes closed, searching for her voice, for her thoughts…

Nothing. There was nothing.

Nate slumped down into the couch. He had lost it all. He had lost the two things in life he cared about.

His powers…his telepathy…and Claudine…

_Hello? Nate?_

Nate shot upwards.

_Claudine! Is that you?_

_Yes, Nate! What is wrong? I sense your sadness!_

Nate breathed a sigh of relief and sat back down.

_Nothing is wrong, Claudine,_ he thought to her. _Not while I've still got you._

"Finally!" Cried Jack's father. "The damn muties are gone!"

Bill O'Reilly was on the television, and a huge smile was on Jack's father's face. O'Reilly was telling the world about how some mysterious phenomenon had rid the world of the "mutant menace." Jack's fat father was sitting on the couch in his wife-beater and jeans, as always. He would have been drunk, but he had run out of Bud last night, and hadn't yet gotten up the energy to leave the house. Jack was sitting next to him, trying his best to fake a smile.

"I tell you," said Jack's father, "My only regret is that it wasn't the Sentinels that did. Marvels of American engineering, those things are. It's too bad they didn't get the chance to incinerate every damn mutie! Especially that Miller bastard!" he took another swig of his root beer. Jack wasn't sure if his father was aware that the soda he was drinking wasn't actually beer.

"Dad, Miller's been dead for years."

"He didn't get a chance to really be punished. Them robots woulda blasted the bastard outta this world!"

Jack stopped smiling.

"Punished for what? Firing your drunk ass? Brian Miller was the best damn mechanic that garage ever had, Dad, and you were the worst!"

His father's eyes widened, but Jack went on.

"And I'm still convinced you were part of that mob! You had to be! It gets out that he's a mutant a week after he fires you and two days later an army of ignorant bastards leaves him swinging from a tree? And you claim you weren't involved? You're a damned liar!'

Jack's father stared at Jack for a long time, O'Reilly still blathering on on the TV.

"And you're a mutie-lovin', bleedin'-heart sack of shit!"

He smashed his bottle on the arm of the couch and swung with all his might. Jack tried to duck, but his father was to fast for him. The glass broke on impact, and Jack fell to the ground, bleeding from five different cuts on his face.

"You ain't gonna talk to me that way, boy!"

Jack kept cowering on the ground, bleeding from four different cuts on his face.

"From now on you're gonna respect me like you damn well should!"

Jack looked up at his father, then shielded his face, the three cuts pourin blood onto the couch. His father raised his arm again.

"I'm gonna—what the hell?"

Jack's two cuts continued to bleed, until there was only one. His father stared on in horror as the last cut disappeared. Jack felt the tears coming once more. He tried to plead with his father, but the words wouldn't come.

"Dad, please, I—I couldn't—I didn't want—Please—"

"Get outta my house, freak!"

The bottle came crashing down again as the sobbing Jack desperately made a run for the door. His father gave chase, screaming about the things he was going to do. Jack got to the door long before the fat man, who was out of breath. He put his hand on the knob—

No. He wouldn't let this bigot win.

His father had regained his wind and was running full speed at the boy, who had stopped in front of the door and turned to face him. The fat man screamed about mutie scum and lyin' boy and get outta this house. He caught up to Jack and lifted the bottle, then felt a sharp stabbing pain in his stomach. He dropped the bottle.

"What…what the—hurk!"

The pain stabbed further into him, up through his gut and into his chest. He felt a painful sensation in his heart.

"Goodbye, dad," said the teenage mutant, his face full of tears.

By the time James Knox was found on the floor of his Maplewood, New Jersey home with his stomach impaled and his heart ripped out, his son, Jack Knox, was nowhere to be found.


	2. A Frightened Child

(A/N: I've set this story in my hometown and thrown in some details about the setting, just in case anyone from here reads this.)

Nate wished he knew where Jack was.

If he could only locate his friend, he could establish a telepathic link and find out what was going on. But Jack was somewhere far away, and Nate couldn't reach someone unless he knew where they were, and that was somewhere nearby. He had only stumbled across Claudine because she, too, had emerging psionic powers. She could not initiate telepathic conversation, but her mental strength made her mind stand out so much in a sea of others that Nate could easily establish a link, and his feelings for her had grown so strong that he could find her almost instantly, despite the Atlantic Ocean. He had never actually seen Claudine, except in his mind's eye, but they had bonded because neither of them had anyone else in whom to confide their secrets.

But enough. His thoughts had wandered, as they always did, to Claudine. He needed to focus on Jack.

He had hoped that his friendship with Jack would allow a link between them to emerge, the way his feelings for Claudine had, but despite his constant mental searching he had found nothing. He hoped they would catch him, just so he would see it on the news and know where he was. He knew Jack's powers and was desperately hoping that they hadn't been involved in his father's death, although the descriptions he had heard of the corpse sounded as if Jack had had his way with it…

All he wanted was to find out what had happened.

He was walking down South Orange Avenue, his mind completely absorbed by the business with Jack, when suddenly he heard honking, yelling and the sound of cars whizzing past him. He looked up and realized that he had wandered off the sidewalk right into the busiest intersection in town. He yelled an apology, although he knew none of the drivers could hear it, and ran across the crosswalk, dodging cars as he went. When he reached the stoplight he leaned against the wall of the diner and cursed his stupidity.

He thought for a minute of asking Claudine to combine her psionic abilities with his, but he decided against it. He wasn't really sure exactly what Claudine's powers were—she had never told him, and he had never seen reason to ask—but he was pretty sure she wasn't a telepath.

"Oh well," sighed Nate as he entered the comic shop. "I guess I'll just have to wait until he shows up on the news."

Jack was glad Nate didn't know where he was.

Nate thought that nobody knew he was a mutant, but Jack could tell. For one thing, he was always bringing things up that he shouldn't have known about, starting conversations about things that had happened to Jack before Jack got the chance to tell him about them. After Jack had noticed this, it wasn't long before he realized the strange feeling he got around Nate. A feeling...in his mind. A feeling of being invaded.

If Nate knew where Jack was, he would enter his mind and learn about what had happened the other night. That was the last thing Jack needed. Luckily for him, even he didn't seem to know how far he had gone.

All night long he had run. He couldn't remember what he passed or what direction he was going, only that he was running, extremely fast and literally nonstop. Looking back on the previous night, he felt as though his mind had been in a haze, a berserk fury that come on after he had killed his father.

He did have one clear memory f that night, though.

On his way out of town he had pass a large tree. Four years ago, he had been the one who had found Brian miller, hanging from an overhead branch. The scent of death still surrounded it. Jack had stopped and slashed the tree with is bloody hand. Four slash marks and a bloodstain had been left on the bark of the tree

He realized now that that was a dead giveaway. A mutant-hater was dead, his son was missing, and claw marks with his blood were left at the scene of a crime he was widely believed to have been a part of. But last night, Jack hadn't had the capacity to think about that.

Now he did. He stared at his right arm. The razor-sharp nails at the end of his hand looked just like ordinary fingernails that hadn't been cut in a while, but they were caked in blood, blood that soaked his arm up to the elbow. With his left hand he brushed his short, brown hair out of his green eyes, which were widened with horror at the continuing realization of what had happened.

He was in the woods somewhere, sitting against a tall tree, just staring at his arm. He started to hyperventilate. He felt his heart beating faster as he realized what a horrific sight his right arm was. He closed his eyes and tried to calm down. He managed to slow his breathing somewhat, and he felt his heartbeat returning to normal, but he still couldn't shake this terror that had come over him. What was he going to do now/ Where could he go? How long before they caught him?

He heard mechanical whirring sounds and crashing noises coming from deeper in the woods. He couldn't see what the noise was through the convenient fog, but he didn't like the sound of it. He stood up and hid behind the tree. Peaking around, he saw two pairs of what looked like headlights floating high in the air. He heard the crashing and thw whirring getting closer, and saw the headlights sweeping across the ground. He could smell something…something metallic…

Oh God.

He took off running, taking cover in the trees, trying to move through the woods as silently as he could. He felt like the animal that he was becoming, running through the shadows covered in blood and sensing his enemy by smell. How apropos that it was a bear trap that brought him down.

Jack screamed louder than he thought he could. He fell down. The whirring stopped, then started again. It was coming closer now. He screamed and struggled to get out of the trap. The big tree he was behind came crashing down.

The Sentinels loomed above him.

Jack managed to pull the trap off of his leg and ran as fast as he could with this wound. His only hope was that his healing powers would kick in before the Sentinels incinerated him….

_The remains were found in the woods, approximately 250 miles South of the scene of the James Knox murder, which the mutant is suspected to have been involved in._

Oh no, thought Nate. He had just turned on the local news channel.

_Authorities said the remains were mangled and destroyed, as if the Sentinels and the mutant had struggled for a long time._

Nate couldn't believe his ears. Had the Sentinels really finished Jack off?

He decided to hear the full story. He grabbed the Tivo remote and rewound back to the beginning.

Then he heard something that sent a smile creeping across his face.

_The smashed remains of two Sentinels were found in a New Jersey woods last night…_


	3. Massacre

(A/N: We're gonna leave Nate with that smile on his face and jump back to last night. Don't know if you can change the fiction rating, but if you can I'm going to raise the rating on this story. This is turning out a lot more violent than I expected.)

The Sentinels knew he was there, but they didn't know where he had gone. After prying the hunter's trap off of his foot, Jack had crawled away slowly at first, but then, deciding that the pain of running on an injured foot was better than the pain of incineration, he had stood straight up and bolted. He had fallen a few times, but his momentum had kept him going. Now he was crouching behind a large rock which the Sentinels hadn't checked yet. He looked at his foot. It was almost healed.

One of the Sentinels was approaching the rock. It spread its hand and reached for it. Its mechanical fingers closed around the stone.

Jack grabbed one of the fingers.

The Sentinel lifted the rock and lowered its head to see if anything was behind it, and Jack struck. Leaping forth from the hand of the android, he grabbed on to its faceplate. The Sentinel raised its hands to brush him off, but Jack, still hanging on with his left hand, punched it in the face with his right, denting the metal creature just blow its left eye. Surprised by the force of the blow, the robot staggered back.

Jack could feel the haze descending on his mind once more. Using the momentum of the Sentinel's backward movement, he backflipped onto the top of its head. He unleashed a bestial roar that scared the hell out of him and drove his bloody right arm downward, through the top of the death machine's head. Jack was vaguely aware of cuts and electric shocks all up and down his arm, but the animalistic rage was slowly consuming his mind, and he felt no pain. He grabbed onto circuit and wires and pulled them out, then threw his hand back in and yanked out more hardware. The Sentinel was careening back and forth, but Jack held on with all his might, pulling and pulling until the machine couldn't think anymore. It fell to the ground.

Jack, now fully consumed by the haze of his mutation, leapt off the Sentinel at the last possible moment, landing in tree. He searched for the other robot, but he didn't have to search long. He felt a rush of intense heat as a yellow blast devastated the tree. He leapt to safety again, landing perfectly on his feet below the burning tree. He began to run in the direction the blast had come from. He ran on all fours, letting out growls and roar that called to mind the battle cries of a jungle cat. Soon he was close enough that he could see the machine clearly, despite the fog. The Sentinel raised its smoking hand, but Jack continued toward it.

The Sentinel unleashed blast that overshot the beast of a boy as Jack ran between its legs. Before the thing had time to react, Jack leapt the back of its knee and ripped off the metal plating. The Sentinel tried to turn, but Jack caught on to its foot and jumped up to its knee, to it waist, to its shoulders. The android tried to swat the boy off, but Jack deftly jumped over its hand and landed back on its shoulder. He dug his clawlike nails into the neck of the great mechanical beast. The Sentinel turned its palm to face Jack and let out a blast. Jack once again leapt to the safety of nearby tree and watched as the Sentinel annihilated its own head.

Both of his enemies were down, but Jack's bloodlust was not satisfied. He jumped down from the tree onto the breastplate f the Sentinel and went to town. He ripped, shredded, bashed, threw, and pulled until the upper half of the remains of the Sentinel was completely gone, then ran back to the scene of his first victory and similarly mauled the other Sentinel. Then, still completely under the control of the feral haze, he took off running once more.

…………….

Bob was driving home from dropping his daughter off at school when something very fast jumped out in front of his truck. He slammed the clutch, but his front bumper smacked into the creature just the same. Horrified, Bob got out of the truck and ran around front, thinking he had hit somebody's dog. The last thing he expected to see was a teenage boy with a bloody arm.

Bob screamed and kneeled to check the boy's heart beat. Relieved to find his heart still beating, Bob felt for injuries. Two of the boy's ribs and his right leg felt broken, and he was unconscious.

Bob didn't have his cell phone, but he wasn't far from the police station and he figured that was as good a place as any to go in this situation. He lifted the boy and placed him in the passenger's seat and got back in, turned around and head for the police station.

……………

The boy was lying on a table in the police office. An ambulance had been called, and one of the three officers who had greeted Bob had his finger on the boy's neck, checking for a pulse.

"Well, Mr. Plunkitt," one of the officers said to Bob, "you did a good thing bringing him here. He's in pretty bad shape, what with the broken rib and everything, but—"

"Ribs." Said Bob.

"What?"

"He's got two broken ribs. And a leg.'

The policeman looked puzzled. "His leg isn't broken," he said, "And I was pretty sure I only felt one rib…"

"AAAAAAIIIIIIIIEEEEE!"

The two officers who were speaking to Bob whirled around, guns drawn. The boy on the table had grabbed their fellow officer's fingers and, from the looks of it, ripped them off. He sat up and grabbed the officer, sinking his teeth into to the unfortunate man's neck. Bob panicked and ran screaming for the door, but he tripped over his shoelaces. Both of the officers fired into the boy's back, but the boy—or creature, or whatever he was—reacted only by tearing out a mouthful of the screaming officer's neck. He turned around and stared at the officers, blood dripping from his lupine fangs, his yellow, vertical eyes glowing with the reflection of the lamplight. The two men froze in terror. Bob had almost made it to the door when there was a sickening popping sound. Turning around, he saw that the bullets had been ejected from the boy's back, and the holes were slowly closing. The monster leapt at the two gunmen, grabbing a face in each hand tearing with all his superhuman might. What remained of the two officers fell to the floor. Bob screamed again and tried to run, but the beast was upon him, digging tearing. As his spinal cord left hiss body, Bob's last sensation was teeth in his neck.

The bloody creature kept on tearing away, feeding on the corpse of this man until its hunger was satisfied.

And then the haze lifted.

Wondering where he was, Jack looked around for a minute, until the blurriness left his vision. Then he looked down.

Jack let out a cry of horror and leapt backward, he put his hands to his mouth and felt liquid, then suddenly became aware that he was covered in blood. He leaned over and vomited for what felt like a lifetime, the vomit mixing with the blood on the floor and on his Led Zeppelin T-shirt. Two faceless policeman, a dying cop by the table...and a half-eaten man by the door…

Jack passed out.


End file.
